Book Announcement
Victor J. Vitanza, Chaste Cinematics. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, November
1, 2015.
http://punctumbooks.com/titles/chaste-cinematics/
Victor J. Vitanza (author of Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing)
continues to rethink the problem of sexual violence in cinema and how rape
is often represented in ³chaste² ways, in the form of a Chaste Cinematics.
Vitanza continues to discuss Chaste Cinematics as participating in
transdisciplinary-rhetorical traditions that establish the very foundations
(groundings, points of stasis) for nation states and cultures. In this
offering, however, the initial grounding for the discussions is ³base
materialism² (George Bataille): divine filth, the sacred and profane. It is
this post-philosophical base materialism that destabilizes binaries,
fixedness, and brings forth excluded thirds. Vitanza asks: why is it that a
repressed third, or a third figure, returns, most strangely as a ³product²
of rape and torture? He works with Jean-Paul Sartre and Page duBois¹s
suggestion that the ³product² is a new ³species.²
Always attempting unorthodox ways of approaching social problems, Vitanza
organizes his table of contents as a DVD menu of ³Extras² (supplements).
This menu includes Alternate Endings and Easter Eggs as well as an Excursus,
which invokes readers to take up the political exigency of the DVD-Book.
Vitanza¹s first ³Extra² studies a trio of films that need to be
reconsidered, given what they offer as insights into Chaste Cinematics:
Amadeus (a mad god), Henry Fool (a foolish god), and Multiple Maniacs (a
divine god who is raped and eats excrement). The second examines Helke
Sander¹s documentary Liberators Take Liberties, which re-thinks the rapes of
German women by the Russians and Allies during the Battle of Berlin. The
third rethinks Margie Strosser¹s video-film Rape Stories that calls for
revenge. In the Alternate Endings, Vitanza rethinks the problem of
reversibility in G. Noé¹s Irréversible. In the Easter Eggs, he considers
Dominique Laporte¹s ³the Irreparable,² as the object of loss and Giorgio
Agamben¹s ³the Irreparable,² as hope in what is without remedy. The result
is not another film-studies book, but a new genre, a new set of rhetorics,
for new ways of thinking about cinematics, perhaps postcinematics.
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